Put some hot sauce on a wing and Cam Heyward will tell you what he really thinks. Heyward served as the latest guest on the highly popular “Hot Ones” show on the First We Feast podcast. A long-running program where host Sean Evans eats chicken wings with a guest while trying out way-too-spicy hot sauces.
Toward the end of the show, a teary-eyed Heyward was asked if he’s used analytics more throughout his career. His answer was brief but clear.
“Kids, turn the channel right now. Fuck them analytics,” Heyward said as he laughed with Evans. “Analytics don’t tell the whole story, man.”
When Heyward entered the league in 2012, analytics weren’t nearly as prevalent as they are now. Heck, even online forums weren’t what they are today. Twitter wasn’t nearly as big as it was, not everyone had a podcast, and the news cycle moved at a slower pace. But through the popularity of Pro Football Focus and Twitter accounts dedicated to crunching the numbers, analytics is as popular as analyzing the plays themselves.
It’s certainly not the first time Heyward’s come out against advanced numbers. Last year, he said stats trying to gauge the performance of a play is impossible to reliably do without knowing the scheme and assignments.
“They can’t even tell what we’re trying to accomplish in a play,” he said in November. “Whether it’s trying to two-gap or whether we’re trying to get upfield, whether we have a stunt on, there are all these things they don’t take into account.”
And there’s certainly plenty of merit to that. A player may get dinged for an unsuccessful pass rush but if his job was to serve as the contain player on a stunt and allow the looper to get free up the middle, mission accomplished. That’s where the numbers get fuzzy in telling fans how well a player did or didn’t perform.
Still, there’s a middle ground. And the Scoville scale took away from the normally nuanced Heyward. Analytics and numbers have their place and it’s important to realize not all analytics have to deal with player grades. In fact, most don’t. They can often detail scheme and tendencies, telling you how often a team used play-action on 1st and 10 or its third down man/zone rates.
They can also paint a picture of player health, analyzing the miles a player ran and his speed to measure for signs of fatigue. Those aren’t nearly as visible as a PFF pass-block grade but are important to every franchise, including the more analytically inclined Steelers under GM Omar Khan.
Like them or not, and Heyward definitely doesn’t, analytics are here to stay.
Check out the whole episode below. It’s a lot of fun.
